19th International Conference on Higher Education (I.C.H.E.)
“The Cultural Mission of the University”
August 31- September 2, 2007
Cluj-Naboca / Romania
Opening Address
I.C.H.E. President Ignaz Bender
Chancellor em. of the University of Trier
..... .....As we come together for the 19th meeting of I.C.H.E. many of you will
ask if these conferences have any effect. Certainly many of you appreciate
the exchange of views and experiences. But there are more outcomes.
Please allow me to give two examples.
When we met in Washington DC in 1992 (the topic was “Funding in Higher
Education” and the results were published in a book with Garland/New
York), the president of Carnegie Foundation, Ernest Boyer, Princeton,
recommended strongly to have this conference one day in China. He felt that
the Chinese higher education experts should not be excluded from this
universal higher education dialogue.
We agreed and soon received an invitation from a Chinese university
(Qingdao).
As China started to practice market economy we proposed as
topic of the conference “Demand and Supply of Higher Education in a Market
Economy”. We realized that never more will a central planning commission
decide what goods should be produced but ten thousands of enterprises.
And these enterprises need educated top-personalities.
We did not want to teach from outside how the authorities should handle this
dramatic deficit of higher educated Chinese people but insisted that the
Chinese government give to the conference its official view on how to
overcome this dilemma.
It took several years of dialogue with the Chinese
officials. At the end the government accepted and sent the official speaker
on higher education of the State Education Commission of the People’s
Republic of China. His keynote address surprised all foreign participants. We
heard that China intends to educate its students in a creative and innovative
spirit based on independent thinking and humanism, that China has not
enough universities (one hundred more were needed) to teach students and
therefore needs support from abroad.
One year later an Education Congress took place in the People’s Congress
Hall in Beijing where the State President Jiang Zemin repeated in his speech
essential parts of what we had heard on our conference a year earlier. The
result was that China opened more and more its frontiers for students to
study abroad. Today 650.000 Chinese students frequent foreign universities.
Nobody from our side had expected this as a result of our careful and
sensible talks with Beijing officials when preparing the Qingdao international
conference.
A second example: In May this year I was invited by the Organisation of the
57 Islamic Countries (OIC) to contribute to a university seminar on
“University Ranking” in Tehran/Iran.
As other invited experts from abroad
did not come to Tehran I was the only representative from the non-Islamic
world. Before leaving the General Director of the Islamic World Academy of
Sciences, Moneef R. Zou’bi, informed me as President of I.C.H.E. that since
the International Conference on Higher Education in the last years had been
frequented by participants from Islamic countries, these participants have
essentially been starting a process in the Islamic world to give more attention
and financial support to education, higher education and research.
What
more can we expect?
I wish that this conference of 2007 with its topic “The Cultural Mission of the
University” will also be successful.